The present invention relates generally to medical imaging, and more particularly to generating a 2 dimensional (2D) image having pixels that correlate to voxels of a three dimensional (3D) image.
Cardiovascular diseases, such as heart disease and stroke, are one of the major causes of death in the U.S. To diagnose a cardiovascular disease, medical personnel may perform a Computed Tomography (CT) scan on a patient. A CT scan uses x-ray equipment to obtain image data from different angles around the human body and then processes the data to show a cross-section of the body tissues and organs. The image can then be analyzed by methods using morphological operators to highlight specific areas so that radiologists (or other medical personnel) can more easily diagnose problems such as cardiovascular diseases associated with the patient.
The CT scan typically provides high quality 3D images and image sequences of the patient's heart. These images often enable reproducible measurements of cardiac parameters, such as left ventricular volume, wall thickness, and parameters associated with the coronary arteries.
In recent decades, researchers have developed a wide variety of segmentation techniques for isolating coronary arteries (i.e., the blood vessels that supply blood and oxygen to the heart) from the rest of the CT scan. Coronary arteries are typically difficult to segment because of their size and proximity to the surface of the heart and blood pool.
Medical personnel often obtain and use a 3D image of the heart (or other organs of interest) in order to diagnose a patient. These medical personnel often also use a two dimensional (2D) representation of the organ to more clearly analyze particular portions of the organ. There remains a need, however, to correlate pixels of the 2D view with voxels of the 3D volume so that medical personnel can simultaneously use both representations to analyze the organ.